SAP CRM7.0 Ehp 1&2 e-learning courses: first impressions

I’ve always been impressed by the quality of all SAP PRESS books I’ve read… but was running out of new things to read lately, so I decided to make an investment and buy two e-learning courses, 350€ each (= 1000$):

This is definitely far more expensive than any SAP PRESS book you can get, and as everything is online, no printed version of the documents will be delivered.

So what do you got for 1000$ ?

Well you will be granted access to 1,6Go of documents! Which is huge. But surprisingly, as you can see in the picture below, there is no comparison between EhP1 and EhP2 documentation:

The above picture is a graphical representation of the space used on my hard drive after I downloaded both courses’ content on my PC (I used scanner to create this picture). That’s a fact: both courses are the same price, but one is more than 5 times bigger than the other.

And there is more: you won’t find any “SAP marketing/self selling” stuff in OCR71 session, but only very valuable information. On the contrary, in OCR72 approximately 15% of the content is dealing with the same kind of slides that you see in every SAP training starting with:

“Today’s customers are empowered like never before…“

“Executives are faced with highly volatile economic conditions…“

“Economic concerns are affecting business activity…“

etc.

For sure, this kind of assertion and the very nice picture that comes with it doesn’t teach you anything about EhP2 functionalities.

So I think it is clear now that I’m definitely not convinced about OCR72: I won’t recommend it.

Would I recommend OCR71 then? The answer is yes… but if you’re used to SAPPress purchasing experience, prepare for a BIG change:

First of all, one would expect to buy an e-learning course with nearly a one-click action (i.e. select the course, give your credit card number and off we go). Well, not this time: on the french SAP training website, you cannot pay online by credit card number. No kidding: you must know how to enter your whole credit card information into one 10-characters-long field:

So before you can access your online session you’ll have to wait for your paper invoice, send back your payment, etc. Come on: we are talking about e-learning session here!

That’s why I decided to use the website from another country. There I was offered the possibility to pay by credit card, and had to wait for a confirmation email with detailed information on how to access the online content. I placed my order on the 6th of October around 6PM, and was expecting this email on the 6th of October 7PM.

No email received on the 6th of October.

No email received on the 7th of October.

No email received on the 8th of October.

No email received on the 9th of October.

…

I sent an email to SAP education support on the 10th of October to ask why it was taking so much time to activate my account… and received an answer within 2 hours with my brand new credentials. Could I finally start my online course?

NO. I was facing error: “No authorization to access this content”.

Since then I’ve been struggling to make it work. And as you can see from my inbox, this is a full time job 🙂 :

What do all those messages say ? Let me sum it up very quickly :

From

To

Details

SAP education

Me

“- Dear customer, invoice is paid. Access is granted. Contact SAP support for any issue”.

Me

SAP support

“- May you please help me: I’m facing authorization issues”

SAP support

Me

“- Thanks for contacting SAP. We are processing your request”.

SAP support

SAP education

“- Let the customer know when access is activated”.

SAP education

Me

“- Access activated, sorry for inconvenience”.

Me

All SAP

“- Still facing the same issue. Please help”.

SAP support

Me

“- Thanks for contacting SAP. We are processing your request”.

SAP support

Me

“- Activation may take a while, please try again in a few hours”.

Me

SAP support

“- Thanks. Now I can attend the session, but still facing errors when accessing documents. Here is my user id/pwd”

“- Before I change my settings, may you please confirm that you can access those documents from your location?”

SAP suupport

Me

…

SAP support

Me

“- Indeed there seems to be an error on our side. Issue sent to the person responsible”

…

…

…

SAP support

Me

“- Dear customer, we changed something. May you please try again?”

Me

Sap support

“- Still facing the same issue”

…

…

…

Looks like a usual OSS message, doesn’t it?

😉

Good news is: someone is answering my messages within decent delay.

Bad news is: issue still open, and I will probably not book any online course ever again.

That being said, OCR71 is very good. But if you’re looking for the best value, check out SAPPress website.

—————————————————-

Updated on the 17th of October :

I still do not have access to all e-learning courses’ content. But more important, my account was debited 423,50€ instead of 350€… so beware the small line saying “price does not include local taxes” (and I find it very strange to be charged VAT for Belgium when the invoice is sent to France, but I’m not really familiar with European laws in this regard), and do not trust the confirmation screen where you enter your credit card number that says: “total to pay = 350” 😡

—————————————————-

—————————————————-

Updated on the 25th of October :

After a few days someone at SAP support told me I would be reimbursed 423,50€ and charged 350€ only (as mentioned on the validation screen of my order). But my bank account was debited twice: first time on the 15th of October (423,50€), and a second time on the 22nd (350€). I was never credited 423,23€ as expected. Sent a mail to SAP on the 23rd but still waiting for an answer. I can’t believe it, must be a nightmare.

—————————————————-

—————————————————-

Updated on the 30th of November :

Here I am more than one month later: still fighting to get my money back. After a countless number of emails, I got the promise from the accounting department that I would receive a check for the reimbursement of the money that was erroneously debited on my bank account. I couldn’t imagine I would face so many difficulties at each and EVERY stage of chain. But the good thing is: now I’ll probably look at CEOs complaining about SAP with far more compassion than I used to…

—————————————————-

—————————————————-

Updated on the 18th of December :

I’ve just received my statement of account: I was finally credited the money that had been erroneously debited (423,50€) on the 10th of December. No comment.

24 Comments

It’s sad to see that something so simple has been made difficult. In terms of EHP2 vs EHP1, I think part of the problem is that IMHO there is nothing of signficant value to make a SAP CRM Customer jump to EHP2 if they already are on EHP2 unless they need something specific. I have looked at the release notes for EHP2 and it shows a much smaller and less full of innovations compared to EHP1. Maybe SAP will fix this with EHP3, but yes unless you are using a specific EHP2 scenario the EHP1 content is more valuable.

To be fair to SAP comparing this with third party sources which focus soley on knowledge products is not fair. I feel that a lot of the SAP developed in-house training materials and courses are treated like a necessary evil of selling the software in the current form. I think the quality of the 3rd party materials with SAP blessing is better because they are selling those as their primary business instead of making sure they get more software sales and need to make sure that people want to buy those knowledge products.

I do have a slight bias in this matter in wanting people to check out some of the other sources for a better value. However I have been on the “purchasing” side of much 3rd party SAP knowledge source and generally agree for the dollars spent you do get more value for your money than the e-courses. Although I will admit that SCN probably has the best value ratio for SAP CRM because it is free and has great content due to contributions from people like you 🙂 . However I won’t discourage anyone from picking up some of the great books on SAP CRM from other sources. The SAP CRM Middleware book and SAP Web Client book have been quite useful. John Burton’s book on the Interaction Center is quite awesome.

I agree with you on almost everything you wrote, except that it’s not fair to compare SAP e-learning solutions to third party sources… Because if you do not compare, how do you know if you’ve got the best value for your money?

I must say the books you mentioned are fantastic ones (I’ve read 2 out of 3). You could have listed also: Next generation abap development, or 100 things you should know about abap workbench, etc. But would you spend 2 000$ to get one of them? And what if you discovered missing features afterwards?

Anyway, I’m looking forward to reading this one that looks very promising:

Yes I agree in cost comparison is fair, but I think I was saying that dealing with a huge monolith company like SAP that has thousands of employees and primary focus is not on education vs a small company that is focused on education is not fair fight. In this case the smaller company should always have the advantage over the larger company due to the fact that the focus is not the same. I agree I wouldn’t pay large amounts($$$$) for a single book even on the same scale.

Well the book is delayed, can’t go into any other details beyond it will arrive later next year. For some of the SCN SAP CRM community members here I’m not sure If you will learn anything new from my book, just because it covers the foundation concepts. Another interesting twist is that book really does not focus on the web client at all. In fact except for showing the results of business requirements and a section on the AET it stays completely underneath the covers and below the BOL/GENIL layers. You will see things like CRM Data Model(One order, Business Partner, Products), Business Transaction Events, XIF, SPPFCADM, Open Channel Marketing BADI, incompletion, and partner determination exits covered in the book. Yeah it’s kinda like this but much better and longer.

thanks for sharing your experience and also your feedback with regards to the content. I am sorry to hear you had some issues or inconveniences during the purchase process and currently still with the access of the e-learning content. Just to let you know I am currently engaging with our teams in France as well as our technical e-learning support to get more details and make sure we can help you swiftly.

I have meanwhile received feedback from our teams that processed your order as well as the technical support teams. I would like to sincerely apologize for the technical issues you had on behalf of SAP Education and I can assure you that in this case it was a specific issue for the OCR72 course that was based on a wrong set-up in our backend systems. I can understand your disappointment, however, certain aspects of what you say are standard procedures or relate to the specific learning format of the OCR content.

OCR71 and OCR72 are early product training formats which are of a different content format and value proposition than regular SAP Education e-learning courses. Unfortunately, that may be why they may not have met your expectations (see further explanations below). Please allow me to clarify a few things in greater detail with regards to some of your statements above.

Firstly regarding your purchasing experience:

The payment option with credit card is unfortunately not available in all countries, thus I believe you have purchased through SAP Belgium which in turn has the credit card payment facilities.

You placed the order on 6th October which was a Saturday and that is unfortunately out of our business hours. We processed your order on Monday 8th October and it takes 2 business days to activate access as stated in our terms and conditions.

Unfortunately in this case the permissions for this specific e-learning course were not set-up correctly in our back-end systems which is why you could not access the course properly when receiving access on 10th October.

Please note that pricing in each country varies within certain price bands based on local market conditions which is why one may find price differences in various countries.

FYI – the 10 digit long field you mention refers to our Preferred Card system which is a training credit system for large enterprise customers.

Regarding your technical issues:

You reported the access issues on 10th October with regards to OCR72 (OCR71 worked fine according to my information) and our technical support liaised with the course registration team in Belgium to modify the permissions that were set-up incorrectly for OCR72.

On 11th October after initial problems you managed to access the e-learning course, however, not all content elements were visible to you.

As an interim solution to provide you access to the content as quickly as possible the technical support team sent you the actual materials for download. This is not our standard procedure but I do hope this helped you to get started with learning quickly.

The access issue was then passed to our second level support as some elements for OCR72 were set as private and therefore you were not able to see all content items. This is a mistake on our side which I would like to apologize for.

On 15th October the issue was resolved and all items except one content unit (which is still private and we clarify why this is the case) were now visible to you.

Some comments regarding your content related statements:

Both courses OCR72 and OCR71 are early product training formats (or so called “Online Knowledge Products OKP”, see notes in the course description) which means they are not our standard e-learning format from SAP Education but they are a collection of pdf based materials which we publish for early product releases. We offer this type of self-paced learning for consultants that want to familiarize themselves with the latest information on a given product release. This format DOES NOT represent the standard e-learning from SAP Education which would normally include simulations, demonstrations as well as assessments and a higher degree of learner interactivity. You may want to have a look in our e-learning demo center to get an idea of our standard e-learning look & feel.

The content created for these types of early product trainings is created by SAP solution management (not SAP Education) and therefore may contain marketing/sales related materials that were available at the time. The degree to which such materials are included varies from course to course and in our view, as for early product releases the information available is limited, it is better to keep them in than to remove them. The marketing type statements should help you as a consultant to position the solution with a customer. I realize, however, the ones that you quote are very generic and might not necessarily help for that purpose.

In any case I will pass back your feedback to the course owner who can then incorporate your suggestions in the next content update/course release.

I hope this makes it a bit easier for you to understand the reasons why some of these issues occurred and hopefully it will change your mind that not all e-learning purchase experiences with SAP Education are like this. Feel free to reach out to me directly in future should you have further concerns or questions. I can also put you in contact with our training manager in SAP Belgium or France if you would like to discuss this further.

The summary you made of what happened is perfect. Thank you for your interest & commitment to have my problems resolved. I confirm that today everything seems to be working fine.

However, I must admit that I still cannot beleive what I read in your very first paragraph untitled “Purchasing experience”. To be honest until today I tought this was another bug (like the one with my initial access to the course’ content, or to specific documents, or the incorrect amount that was debited on my bank account, etc.). But as far as I understand it is intended not to offer the possibility to pay an e-learning course by credit card, and to have to wait for 2 business days (hence 4 if like me you placed your order on a saturday) to have it activated.

Hopefully this is not what SAP considers a “best-run e-process” that will be included in SAP business suite 🙂

Maybe I’m too demanding, but as a CRM consultant, I’m convinced that your web site is your best showcase… so I hope you’ll be able to fix this as soon as possible.

I am going to say that based on my experience with other subscription services such as CRM experts it does take sometimes an extra day or two to get the content activated and that is a $$$$ service. The process should be real-time or completely automated given the fact that you can get license now an SAP HANA instance on AWS in 5 minutes, why should training take more than one hour. Last time I checked the HANA stuff doesn’t have business hours. If SAP wants to sell real-time to customers then they need to also act realtime and not like a batch organization 😉 .

In terms of content though sorry but we have to base offerings on the OKP materials, because it appears SAP education has no desire to produce any modern offerings for SAP CRM and with the exception of the Web client courses the CRM curriculum has grown stale and tired as it almost the same since 2008/2009 even though the product has evolved forward. The certification programs also reflect a complete disconnect from the reality of the consultant job descriptions in the market and support roles found at most customer installations. The buckets for certification do not reflect any true job roles found at most customer installations, nor requirements for consultants.

However because I refuse to get certified because the certifications do not match my job role, SAP refuses to listen to me because they have this wrong view of the world that only people certified by their program are technically capable of suggesting new certification exams or content. I know this is true because SAP education has told people outside of SAP organization that you must first be certified by them in order to help suggest content for certifications.

thanks for your views and I must say I am sorry to hear that you feel the CRM certifications o not match yur project experience. However we do run a job task analysis process to validate the roles for all certification exams and these have always been validated with external practitioners as well as our own consultants in the field. You will probably be interested to note that one of the measures we have agreed upn and are due to imlement next month is providing a link to a validation survey for the JTA of exams in the SCN Education and Certification space so keep an eye on it and feel free to give your input in the future. I think using SCN as a platform for this will allow us to address a wider external audience in a more scaleable way than our previous processes and am looking forward to the feedback.

I do have to correct one misconception from your input though. We absolutely do not insist that anyone needs to be certified to provide feedback on the roles and tasks. That has never been a requirement and we are not considering it as a necessary prerequisite for the future. Where we do insist that people are certified (regardless of whether they are SAP internal or external) is if they engage with us to write exam questions. As you know as n SAP mentor we are keen to engage SAP Mentors in this process and there have been several discussions in SCN on this. We offer SAP Mentors the option to take the exam free of charge with us if they are considering offering their support in an item writing workshop. The reason we insist on certification is twofold. Firstly it is one of our criteria to be able to assess whether an individual has the necessary prodct expertise. We could of course use project testimonials etc. and do look at CVs to assess where the areas of expertise are but certification in the appropriate field is of course a valuable validation step for us and – as I am sure you will appreciate – it is our responsibility to those intendng to certify as well as our customers that we validate that subject matter experts writing exam questions are qualified to do so. I hope that helps to clarify.

I stand by my statement as I remember that to create or build new certifications only certified people can work on building new certification exams. I have stated for the last three years publicly and semi-privately that the SAP CRM curriculum is not up to par and this not something I have backed down from.

It has never been a cost issue or access issue for taking a certification for me. It has been because the paths do not match my job experience. I do not consider myself a pure ABAP developer and the CRM functional certifications are based on product module areas rather than implementation focus. There is not even a certification based on the web client UI development, even though there were two courses on that.

So for my question if you were to develop a certification on the CRM web client UI, what prior certifications would those people need to in order to develop those questions? I want to know how would being certified in ABAP or CRM basic configuration make you more qualified to write those questions than someone with several project years of experience with the product? I’m not saying for me in particular, but who would write that exam. By your standards if the product developers aren’t certified then they aren’t qualifed to write the exam on the product they developed. That’s my problem with the process. However perhaps all the other areas don’t have this issue and just an issue because that there still isn’t any certifications for SAP CRM Web Client development since the product has been released three+ years ago and the web client is the standard interface for current releases in mainstream use of SAP CRM.

that’s fine. Of course as with all policies we make exceptions if it is not feasible or relevant for someone to be certified in a particular area. I just wanted to make sure that your statement “SAP refuses to listen to me because they have this wrong view of the world that only people certified by their program are technically capable of suggesting new certification exams or content. I know this is true because SAP education has told people outside of SAP organization that you must first be certified by them in order to help suggest content for certifications” was put into context as we do indeed listen to and value input on the roles and the prerequisite of being certified has nothing to do with the role profiling and job task analysis process – which is where we gather feedback on the roles and topics. Your statement is unfortunately misleading and I didn’t want it to put off the many folks ( some of whom I am sure are not certified) from continuing to support us in this validation work.

My comment is based on the fact that I remember hearing that only certified individuals can suggest the actual content of certification exams for area of expertise. I’m sure there are other areas, but I wanted to know for areas where there are gaps who draws up the criteria or builds the exam. I’m sure there are plenty of other feedback channels that SAP listens to, and I’m not doubting that..

I still have never received an answer to my question about why SAP has never updated the certification program for SAP CRM to include a technical track that reflects the SAP CRM Web Client Development. Based on the standard SAP curriculum for SAP CRM which includes courses on SAP CRM Web Client Development and if you look at the rest of other courses there is a corresponding certification.

If there are feedback channels into the job task analysis for what SAP CRM consultants do, then how is such a huge hole such as this missed within the last three years? I just find it weird that SAP would have missed this in their analysis of job tasks and also not get any feedback saying that such area should be covered.

I checked back with the portfolio manager and he was able to confirm that CRM Web Client Development is covered in the existing certification exams under CRM User Interface as a topic and is weighted at more than 12% of the content of all the exams so I hope that addresses your query.

Honestly having 12% covered in an exam is not having the same as matching specific real-world job role that appears to be ignored both in consulting and customer support. I really cannot accept that SAP did enough proper research on typical CRM consultant and customer support job functions and came to some conclusion that by having 12% content within the other exams there is no need to cover a function.

That’s my argument is that SAP has always ignored within the certification a true technical-functional certification for SAP CRM that matches the real-world requirements for supporting SAP CRM. It’s very hard to not search on a job message board for sap crm as key words and not see requirements for a SAP CRM webclient developer or someone with background. That’s completely different type of background than someone who can configure CRM sales, service or marketing.

Once again if SAP can offer two courses on the topic, then why can’t people get certified in that area, when it matches 100% of customer requirements for SAP CRM instead of having to take certifications that don’t match customer requirements. Once again the SAP CRM web client development and configuration knowledge is core to any SAP CRM project and not just something that should be treated as topic to include among many other areas.

To go one step further, I would immediately take the certification exam for SAP CRM Web Client and pay for it out of my own pocket if made available and encourage everyone else in the SAP CRM technical community to attempt the certification when they feel ready if made available. Pass or fail, I would blog on my experience and recommend to others. Not saying it would result in a thousand people getting certified but I could see a positive impact for everyone.

The comparison with CRM Experts was to see whether signup for training materials on SAP topics from third party providers was better or worse than the SAP experience. After looking from my research SAP was on-par based on the expected time minus no problems. I was trying to say that if there had been no technical difficulties the times you mentioned were completely reasonable compared to other 3rd party sources.

The next comparison was more how it is quicker to get a cloud based installation of SAP HANA on Amazon AWS than to purchase training materials from SAP right now. Yes you can actually purchase on-demand access to SAP HANA and have it running in less time than buying some of the training materials for other products. Folks need/want the access to function more like iTunes/Google/Amazon rather than a delayed sign up process.

Finally I’m going to plug a great book on why all these customer experience issues matter. The book is the customer experience edge(a quick google or lookup on amazon should find it).

meanwhile I also got feedback from my colleague who manages the CRM training area:

“I would not characterize the CRM curriculum as stale. The truth of the matter is that the core CRM solution is very stable and has been for some time, and our curriculum planning has followed suit.

Efforts in CRM curriculum design over the past few years have been to consolidate and optimize the courses so that they are focused and aligned to the core knowledge that is required to successfully implement and run SAP CRM. Although new enhancements have certainly been made in the CRM solution, we have not always incorporated these enhancements, largely because of their focus on specific topics or industry specifics.

Of course, to cover these enhancements, Online Knowledge Product (OKP) have always been available and will continue to be made available.

A recent, and notable, exception was the creation of the ICP600 course, covering the Trade Promotion Management (TPM) scenario. The SAP TPM course teaches key capabilities and processes covered by SAP TPM. It introduces important aspects related to master data and base customizing settings for the integrated scenario of SAP TPM. Participants will learn how the SAP application supports the entire trade promotion management process and learn how to use SAP TPM by performing practical exercises. Project examples and best practices approaches top off the program. As such, when the opportunity provided by an enhancement makes sense, SAP Education takes it.”

I hope this explains it a little bit better as to why some changes with regards to the CRM curriculum where not so visible/explicit.

you are very right and in my view there is nothing wrong with being demanding, it helps us to understand customer expectations better. We are now working with the French education team to implement the credit card payment facilities as soon as possible.

The 2 day activation process is unfortunately yet again related to the fact that the learning title is an OKP and physically sits on our Service Marketplace platform with a somewhat “dated” authorization concept. During the next year we will turn off this platform and migrate all OKP/Learning Map content to our own SAP Learning Solution platform which hosts all our other content and course registrations. This will then allow for instant activation like with regular course bookings/e-learning course bookings. In any case the instant activation is also country dependent as some countries choose to have a manual verification of payment for security reasons.

Again no excuses but hopefully some background information for you. I can assure you we are working at full speed to remove the last few obstacles to become even better at what we do 🙂

Sorry to get back to you again, but is there a chance that you could catch someone at SAP education belgium to understand why my bank account was debited twice and never credited the first erroneous amount? Because I send them emails but cannot get any answer. It would be very nice of you if you could help…